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The Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has warned members of the House of Lords that their opposition to government bills will make the case for reforming the unelected house even stronger. He was speaking after reports that rebel peers opposed to an elected House of Lords were threatening to sabotage the government's future legislative agenda. Mr Clarke told me in an interview for the Radio 4 programme Law in Action that peers had no say in raising taxes and yet they were seeking to block his plans to reduce spending on legal aid. Although he was considering some minor concessions, which he refused to specify, Mr Clarke insisted that he would not give way in response to lobbying by solicitors. The programme will be broadcast at 4pm today.



I started tweeting in January 2011 and reached 6,000 followers within my first year. I use Twitter both to cover breaking stories -- I was the first to reveal the names of two new Supreme Court judges in the spring of 2011 -- and to alert readers to all my work published elsewhere. 


My email and postal addresses can be found at the bottom right-hand corner of this page.

I now write weekly for the the Guardian's online law page. You can read my columns here.

Although I no longer blog for Standpoint magazine I write a monthly column for the print edition. And I write a fortnightly column for the Law Society Gazette.

My Telegraph blog is an archive of the online work I did for that paper until the beginning of 2009.

I returned to present Law in Action in 2010 after a career break of nearly a quarter of a century. The most recent series was broadcast in October and November 2011and started with a look at how the criminal justice system coped with the English riots of August 2011. Subsequent programmes examined the accountability of public inquiries such as the phone hacking one being chaired by Lord Justice Leveson; boosting detection rates; Scottish sectarianism; reform of human rights law; and whether cyclists can ride roughshod over the law. 

The February/March 2012 series will include programmes on legal aid, on-line privacy and sports law.

All previous editions of the programme are available to listen to here, and not just for the past seven days.

21 February 2012